Christmas Bliss (2 page)

“Would you please just drop it?” Mama’s voice was shrill. “It’s Saturday. He likes to sleep in. Forty years with the post office and now that he’s retired, he can do as he pleases. Do you have to make a federal case about it?”

“No,” I said, knowing the subject was closed. “You’re right, he’s probably fine.” I picked up my phone and read the text message.

“Is it from Daniel?” Mama asked. “Does he say how it went last night?”

“It’s from Julio, one of Daniel’s chefs at the restaurant. Just reminding me that I’m doing a tasting of the food for the reception this afternoon.” I was trying not to let her see how disappointed I was that the text wasn’t from Daniel himself. “Guess I better get over there.”

“Go on then,” Mama said. She picked up the dress and began threading a needle.

“Look,” I said, sitting down on the chair beside hers. “You’re right. It’s not fair to put this much work on you. I’ll hire somebody to alter the dress.”

“No!” Mama cried. Her eyes were suddenly red-rimmed. She clutched the gown with both hands. “I
want
to do this. For you. I don’t want a stranger cutting up your grandmother’s dress.”

“All right.” I gave a short whistle and Jethro crawled out from beneath the table and trotted over toward the kitchen door. I gave my mother a quick hug. “I’ll talk to you later. Tell Daddy bye for me.”

“Don’t forget to tell those folks at the restaurant to save a place on the buffet for my fruitcake,” Mama called after me. “You know how everybody always anticipates it this time of year.”

Anticipates it? Dreaded it, was more like it. Mama’s fruitcake was notorious in Savannah. Heavier than a concrete block, drier than sawdust, and studded with weird candied fruits in colors not found in nature, it showed up on the doorsteps of family and friends every year at Christmas, wrapped in tinfoil and tied up with one of the recycled bows Mama had been saving my whole life. I could have repaved my patio with the blocks of fruitcake she’s presented me with over the years. Instead, every year, I politely thanked her for the fruitcake and then promptly pitched it in the trash, unopened. Even Jethro knew better than to try that fruitcake.

*   *   *

The Saturday lunch rush at Guale had subsided. Julio stood by the table nearest to the kitchen door, in his spotless white chef’s smock, a pale blue linen kerchief knotted smartly around his neck. He gestured proudly at the dishes arrayed around the tabletop. “I hope you’re hungry.”

My eyes widened. There were at least a dozen platters and bowls. “Good heavens. I thought Daniel said we were just doing appetizers for the reception.”

Julio shrugged. “We are the best restaurant in Savannah. In the Southeast. Your guests expect a lot more than some bowl of boiled shrimp and some cheese cubes. Daniel’s instructions were clear. ‘Dazzle ’em,’ he told me.”

“All right. I guess I see your point.” I picked up a fork. “Tell me what I’m tasting.”

“Start with the hot things,” Julio said. “We just took the mini crab cakes out of the oven. And that’s a new remoulade I came up with.”

I dutifully nibbled and nodded my approval. He went on ticking off the various dishes. “Beef tenderloin on brioche with horseradish cream. Chicken satay. Salmon tartar in cornmeal cups, baby lamb chops with cherry-balsamic reduction, pork tenderloin with cranberry-fig compote…”

Julio handed me a plate and began to heap it with more morsels. “Sweet potato puffs. Deviled eggs with caviar, Boursin-stuffed snow pea pods, mini grits and greens tarts…”

“No more,” I groaned after only a few bites. “Seriously, Julio. It all looks and tastes divine, but I can’t eat one more crumb.”

His cheerful face fell. “But you haven’t even tried the desserts yet. My chess-pie tartlets, the Maker’s Mark bread pudding…”

“Don’t forget Marian Foley’s fruitcake,” I added, grimacing.

“What’s that?”

“Never mind. If we’re done here, I’m just going to check Daniel’s office to see if there’s any mail that needs immediate attention, and then I’ve got another appointment.”

He followed me through the swinging doors to the kitchen, and I was about to walk into Daniel’s converted broom closet of an office when something on the staff bulletin board caught my eye.

I stopped. It was a computer printout of a newspaper clipping, blown-up larger for easy reading, and tacked to the board amid photographs of the staff, recent restaurant reviews, and thank-you cards from happy patrons.

The clipping was from the
New York Post
’s Page Six gossip column. And the thing that caught my eye was a photograph of a willowy dark-haired beauty in a spangly cocktail dress with a plunging neckline. Said beauty had her arms wrapped across the chest of a certain hunky chef, resplendent in a black tuxedo. The beauty was staring at the chef with what I interpreted as naked lust. Like she’d just found a gift under the Christmas tree that she was dying to unwrap. The chef? To his credit, Daniel Stipanek just looked startled. Or tired.

But he didn’t look nearly as startled as I probably did at that moment.

The photo had been circled with a thick red marker, and somebody had scrawled on the clipping “The Boss Out on the Town.” I stood closer so I could read the photo caption.

Cucina Carlotta owner Carlotta Donatello’s latest dish isn’t Italian—he’s Daniel Stipanek, the Savannah-born guest chef at Donatello’s hot new Downtown eatery, for whom the heiress-about-town threw a celebrity-studded bash this week.

I stood and stared at the photograph. This was Daniel’s new boss? When he’d announced the guest-chef gig, I’d been elated for him, picturing Carlotta Donatello in my mind as a short, dumpy Italian
nonna
type, with a white bun, faint mustache, thick-lensed eyeglasses, and sensible black lace-up shoes. I’d pictured a senior citizen in a flour-dusted apron, wielding a wooden spoon.

The actual Carlotta Donatello was nobody’s
nonna
. She was probably in her mid-thirties, with a long lustrous mane of hair and huge, long-lashed doe eyes which, in the photograph, were fixed longingly on my fiancé. Also? She had a generous helping of cleavage pressed right against Daniel’s chest.

I felt my face begin to burn.

Julio noticed me noticing, of course. He reached out and ripped the clipping from the bulletin board, wadding it up in his hand. “Pay no attention,” he said. “Ella put this up. She’s from New York and she’s always reading those newspapers online.”

“Umm-hmm,” I said. “Interesting.”

He made clumsy small talk while I sorted through the mail, but I wasn’t paying attention. I couldn’t get that image of Carlotta Donatello out of my mind—the sexy cocktail dress, the pose—with her arms wrapped around Daniel. Daniel! In a tuxedo. As far as I knew, he’d never owned a tuxedo in his life. And a party? He’d never said a word to me about a party. In fact, I hadn’t actually talked to Daniel in two days. And now I knew why. He’d been a busy chef-about-town.

My stomach roiled. Maybe it was all that rich food I’d just sampled. Or maybe it was the indigestible idea of my future husband locked in the sinewy embrace of a rich, glamorous “heiress-about-town.”

Chapter 2

I was still fuming when I left the restaurant, but there was really no time to sulk. My prewedding to-do list was set in stone.

I was expecting a call from BeBe Loudermilk, my best friend and maid of honor, at any minute. It was BeBe who’d set me up with Daniel in the first place, right after she’d hired him as chef at Guale. For a hardcore matchmaker like BeBe, our upcoming wedding was the ultimate validation and demanded updates on every aspect of the ceremony.

But in the meantime, I needed to check in at Babalu, the upscale gift shop Manny Alvarez and Cookie Parker run on the other side of Troup Square from my own antique shop.

I was on a strict timetable. Or so I told myself until I spotted a hot pink poster tacked to an oak tree at the corner of Habersham and 45th, in Ardsley Park, one of my favorite Savannah neighborhoods for junking. The magic words—estate sale—jumped out at me like a twenty-foot neon billboard, even though they were actually only scrawled in Magic Marker on an eleven-by-fourteen sheet of poster board.

I was almost through the intersection when I glimpsed the sign and the arrow pointing right. No time for a turn signal. I made a hard right onto East 45th and was rewarded with an angry blast of a horn from the car right behind me.

Developed as Savannah’s first suburban neighborhood around the turn of the twentieth century, Ardsley Park homes ranged from impressive brick Georgian Revival mansions to chunky Craftsman bungalows to tidy 1940s and 1950s brick cottages. It’s primo antique territory. And this was an estate sale—not a yard sale or a moving sale—which meant dead people’s stuff—my favorite kind of acquisition for my antique shop.

“Sorry,” I muttered, cruising slowly down the street in search of another sign directing me to the house where the sale was being held. Two blocks down, I spotted another pink “Estate Sale” sign planted in an overgrown yard.

As soon as I pulled up to the house, my junk antennae went into overdrive and I knew the antique planets were in alliance. The house was a solidly built Colonial revival, but it had seen better days. The yard was weedy and overgrown, the windows cloudy with grime. A battered cardboard box rested at the curb, and spilling out of it were the sadly bent and tangled wire arms of a disassembled vintage aluminum Christmas tree.

This was a good sign; in the junk game, neglect and decay usually signal treasure within.

Jethro, an experienced junk sniffer who had himself been plucked from a curbside pile of debris, thumped his tail on the leather truck seat. I patted his head in approval. “Good boy. Stay here, buddy.”

I got out of the truck and made a beeline for that aluminum Christmas tree. But when I picked up one of the branches, the brittle foil leaves disintegrated into glittering shards. Sad. I have an irrational affection for cheesy midcentury holiday décor, and aluminum trees are always at the top of my want list. But this one had obviously fallen victim to time and temperature—stored in a blazing hot Savannah attic over the decades.

I put the tree branch back in the box and studied the homemade sign. It was hurriedly written in black marker, and directed sale-goers to proceed around the corner to the lane running in back of the house. Homemade was good—it meant the sale was not being run by a pro. Furthermore, I hadn’t seen any ads for the sale in Craigslist or the
Savannah Morning News
or the
PennySaver
, which hopefully meant that my competition, other dealers, hadn’t already swooped in and scarfed up all the good stuff. And best of all, the sale had started only an hour earlier. Who starts an estate sale at three on Saturday afternoons? Amateurs, that’s who!

I got back in the truck and drove around to the lane, where I spotted another excellent sign—an enormous pile of stuff stacked beside the trash cans. Old cardboard cartons, broken chairs, mounds of clothing still in yellowing plastic dry cleaner’s bags, the skeletons of broken aluminum lawn chairs, and yes—the best sign of all, a cast-off walker and a potty chair.

Like a seasoned anthropologist, I quickly read this particular dig. From the age and water-soaked condition of the boxes, I could tell that somebody had excavated a leaky basement, attic, or garage and they were disposing of anything that looked old or worthless, including clothing. My nose was already twitching in happy anticipation. The folding lawn chairs were exactly like the kind of sixties-era chairs my parents still had in their garage.

Best of all was the presence of the walker and the potty chair. And let’s not forget that ruined aluminum Christmas tree. This homeowner had likely been elderly, which meant their belongings were as vintage as the house. Jethro and I had stumbled across the holy grail, a true, grandma estate sale.

He must have sensed my excitement, because his tail was thumping the leather passenger seat like a snare drum, and he was pawing at the door. “Good boy, Ro-Ro,” I said, giving him a chin scratch. “You stay here and be on the lookout for other dealers.”

I picked my way carefully over a crumbling concrete walkway that lead through an overgrown thicket of privet and headed for the door of a ramshackle screened porch that looked like it had been tacked onto the back of the house some time in the seventies.

An attractive woman dressed in a black Nike tracksuit and spotless pale pink Lanvin sneakers sat at a card table just inside the doorway. In her forties, with short dark hair and a deep tan, she was talking on her cell phone. The pear-shaped diamond on her left hand looked like at least three carats, and the diamond earrings twinkling from her ears were a good two carats apiece. If this was what she wore for tennis, I wondered what kind of jewelry she had for grocery shopping?

“Go ahead on in,” she said, in a refined accent that bespoke a lifetime of sorority chapter meetings and cocktails on the veranda. She held the phone away from her face. “There’s stuff in every room, and prices are negotiable. I’ve got to get this dump emptied out by the end of the day. The contractor’s coming in Monday to start gutting it out.” She wrinkled her elegant nose. “You’ll have to excuse the mess. Bless her heart, my great-aunt Edith really wasn’t able to keep up with housekeeping these past few years.”

I stepped into the house and into the 1960s. The kitchen was smallish, lined with rusting metal cabinets painted the same pale pink as the walls and the linoleum floor. Great-aunt Edith had a thing for pink. All the drawers and cupboard doors were ajar. I lifted a plate from a stack in the cupboard near the sink. It was a hugely popular pattern from the sixties, Franciscan’s Apple Blossom, featuring, of course, pink apple blossoms. There were ten plates in the stack, but each one was chipped. Pass.

Nothing else in the kitchen caught my fancy, so I pushed through a swinging door into the dining room, hoping for better hunting.

Sun shone weakly through the now-naked windows. The floors were bare, and my footsteps echoed in the high-ceilinged room. A dusty crystal chandelier was centered over the dining room table, but only one lightbulb was working.